Explainable Artificial Intelligence-Based IoT Device Malware Detection Mechanism Using Image Visualization and Fine-Tuned CNN-Based Transfer Learning Model

Automated malware detection is a prominent issue in the world of network security because of the rising number and complexity of malware threats. It is time-consuming and resource intensive to manually analyze all malware files in an application using traditional malware detection methods. Polymorphism and code obfuscation were created by malware authors to bypass the standard signature-based detection methods used by antivirus vendors. Malware detection using deep learning (DL) approaches has recently been implemented in an effort to address this problem. This study compares the detection of IoT device malware using three current state-of-the-art CNN models that have been pretrained. Large-scale learning performance using GNB, SVM, DT, LR, K-NN, and ensemble classifiers with CNN models is also included in the results. In light of the findings, a pretrained Inception-v3 CNN-based transfer learned model with fine-tuned strategy is proposed to identify IoT device malware by utilizing color image malware display of android Dalvik Executable File (DEX). Inception-v3 retrieves the malware's most important features. After that, a global max-pooling layer is applied, and a SoftMax classifier is used to classify the features. Finally, gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) along the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) is used to understand the overall performance of the proposed method. The proposed method achieved an accuracy of 98.5% and 91%, respectively, in the binary and multiclass prediction of malware images from IoT devices, exceeding the comparison methods in different evaluation parameters.